Thursday, June 25, 2015

The ACA Survives Another Challenge

I'm pretty satisfied with the 6-3 Supreme Court decision upholding the ACA, because the argument against struck me as being, well, about the "meaning of 'is'". The law, passed over months of debate and effort, is frankly, the size of a big city phone book (kids, go ask your folks what a phone book is) and they went to a lot of effort to make Federal exchanges, which would have been dumb if people in states that didn't opt to set up their own exchanges were not able to participate in them. So we're weighing a four-word phrase against the context of everything that has taken place since the plan was designed?

Even Justice Scalia, in his dissent to the first pro-Obamacare decision a couple years back, knew better that than that! Luckily, words still mean things, even if you don't like what they mean. (But if he doesn't like it, I guess he can hang up his robe and let Obama pick a replacement.)

Just as with the last ACA decision, Chief Justice Roberts is getting called some names. Is it being "a traitor" to read the whole law over one bitched-up phrase? (But if anti-ACA folks feel that way, they can try and get rid of him and let Obama pick a replacement.)

It seems some of the reaction is a little over the top. There have been something like 60 repeal attempts and two court challenges now. At this point, maybe "tinkering" with any parts Republicans particularly don't like might be a more reasonable strategy?

1 comment:

mikey said...

Let us not forget how ludicrous and anti-judicial this case really was, and how outrageous it was that SCOTUS chose to hear it in the first place. Then there was the ridiculous revisionist history of the debate, but come on, for fucks sake, we were all there!! NOBODY. Not one body anywhere, ever suggested that the law was written in such a manner to deny subsidies to people who enrolled via federal exchanges as a coercive method to force the states to create their own exchanges.

There's never been a high court challenge like this because the system has long allowed the implementing body's interpretation of the law to be the 'official' interpretation. Suddenly, there was this opportunistic, exploitative, utterly ridiculous just so story, and if the court had upheld such a challenge we would have been faced with a chaotic jurisprudence for decades.

This was an unavoidable outcome to a ridiculous, unecessary challenge to a law that has lived up to or surpassed every optimistic prediction. There is NO actual set of facts that make it anything but an improvement to American society, and the richest nation in the world shouldn't make sick people play the Hunger Games to see a doctor...

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